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I tend to agree with you but Styles delivers. Also Adele, in fact, Adele makes her live appearances much better than her record studio versions IMHO, I don't know how she does it but man, that woman is another level. Same can be applied to Billie Eilish or Chris Stapleton or Sam Smith, they're unique in their live performances and usually beats their live recording by enhancing them not diminishing them.

Adele is high up there, yes, what a marvel. I don’t know about styles, I do not really listen to his music. My parents were among the lucky ones who went to see Freddy Mercury live, they still talk about that concert, that man could sing, the stage presence and energy was also something you could not get in a recording.

I once was invited to a Justin Timberlake presentation (I would not pay for such thing ?), what a crappy singer, lots of backup dancers, lights and theatrics to hide the fact that he wasn’t really much of a singer or even a compelling artist, good show in general but not because of his talent.
 
What do you mean by energy? The audience? Isn't crowd noise basically the same as radio static? What makes a live version preferable to listen to?

I can see the logic of the live show demonstrating the artist's talent, but that's kind of where my question came from. Doesn't the studio recording act as the ceiling of what you expect? The studio recording is the very best possible performance. I would assume variation from the studio would sound like the artist made a mistake. How can a live performance ever sound better than what they considered the ideal recording?

Neither. But, I don't see the comparison. They don't play basketball in a studio and edit out the mistakes.
Studio recordings and live performances can have different goals. Studio recordings are, generally speaking, intended to be polished, "ideal" versions of the song the artist wrote. In terms of live performances showcasing talent, as you alluded to yes they can edit, delete, re-record as needed to get the "perfect" result. A live performance lets the audience see what they can do on the spot, in one take, no do-overs. Improvisation is also a subset of musical talent very different from people able to reach certain notes or play a piece of written music perfectly, and that's something you get to appreciate better with a live performance.

Now, back to the "studio recordings as perfect" thought, plus the energy aspect - for various reasons, live versions of songs are often arranged differently from studio recordings. I've talked to musicians who've said they haven't been able to translate the sound/vibe from the recording to a live performance, so they don't play it live. Others change how songs sound for similar reasons (e.g., a song that is slow in the recording can sound "perfect," but doesn't have an energy level appropriate for a live performance when performed the same way), or because they got bored of playing it the same way over and over again. Also re: energy and "radio static" - live performers feed off the energy of the crowd. While live studio performances can be amazing as another poster mentioned, it's just a different vibe from a live performance with a crowd, and often it can be "felt" in video and audio recordings/streams of live performances.
 
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Studio recordings and live performances can have different goals. Studio recordings are, generally speaking, intended to be polished, "ideal" versions of the song the artist wrote. In terms of live performances showcasing talent, as you alluded to yes they can edit, delete, re-record as needed to get the "perfect" result. A live performance lets the audience see what they can do on the spot, in one take, no do-overs. Improvisation is also a subset of musical talent very different from people able to reach certain notes or play a piece of written music perfectly, and that's something you get to appreciate better with a live performance.

Now, back to the "studio recordings as perfect" thought, plus the energy aspect - for various reasons, live versions of songs are often arranged differently from studio recordings. I've talked to musicians who've said they haven't been able to translate the sound/vibe from the recording to a live performance, so they don't play it live. Others change how songs sound for similar reasons (e.g., a song that is slow in the recording can sound "perfect," but doesn't have an energy level appropriate for a live performance when performed the same way), or because they got bored of playing it the same way over and over again. Also re: energy and "radio static" - live performers feed off the energy of the crowd. While live studio performances can be amazing as another poster mentioned, it's just a different vibe from a live performance with a crowd, and often it can be "felt" in video and audio recordings/streams of live performances.
It sounds like you are saying you like to listen to recordings of live performances because it introduces variations. The terms vibe and felt don't really have meaning for me. Are you saying you see it as a cover of the original song by the original artist?
 
I wish they did this when Halestorm and Evanensence were touring together last year. That was a concert I was interested in.

It's nice that Apple Music is branching out like this, but I just want an app that works and had a good user interface. Once again Apple is bringing in cool features but ignoring the basics. They want to be hip and cool, but forget that they need something that actually works.
 
I love live and studio recordings equally. Live recordings usually show me the true talent of a musician.
True, apart from the Beatles. They didn't even tour for most of their career.

On a side note, I am utterly shocked your little circle isn't blue and green.
 
It sounds like you are saying you like to listen to recordings of live performances because it introduces variations. The terms vibe and felt don't really have meaning for me. Are you saying you see it as a cover of the original song by the original artist?
That's certainly a part of it. Presumably you can imagine that being at a live performance "feels" different from listening to music at home? Watching/listening to streams or recordings of live performances "feels" different from either one. Some like it, some don't, and none is inherently better than any other.

What are you interested in, may I ask? Comparisons are flawed in nature for sure, but if you are genuinely curious about this maybe it could provide some sort of bridge.
 
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I am not the target market here, but can I ask you music fans a question?

If you aren't seeing an artist in person, wouldn't a studio recording be more enjoyable to listen to?
Same reason why people watch music award shows, it’s more enjoyable to watch a performance than to sit and listen to a recorded track.
 
I am not the target market here, but can I ask you music fans a question?

If you aren't seeing an artist in person, wouldn't a studio recording be more enjoyable to listen to?
Not necessarily. There's a lot you can get from something "recorded all in one take" that you won't get from an album that has been produced in a studio with every instrument/musician recorded separately and then layered together on a mixing console - it's more "perfect" but also more "produced", and less real.

Just off the top of my head, as one random example, I've got videos of Stevie Ray Vaughn concert performances, as well as studio versions of the same songs, and the live ones have a raw excitement/edge to them the studio version can't match. It depends a lot on the group/musician, of course. Some really shine playing live, while for others, live is sort of a desperate attempt to try to pull off an approximation of the sound that they built in the studio. Then there's groups like the Grateful Dead, who were tremendous live (even on a bad night), while a lot of their studio recordings kinda fell flat. On the other side, something like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon should be experienced exactly as they released it on the album. Vaguely related to all this, one of the greatest live albums ever is the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East - if you haven't heard it, you should (layers and layers of well-oiled Rock&Roll machinery fitting together so well, and doing some quite jazzy jams). (FWIW, you might make assumptions about the direction and breadth of my musical taste from these examples - you'd be wrong.)
 
I am not the target market here, but can I ask you music fans a question?

If you aren't seeing an artist in person, wouldn't a studio recording be more enjoyable to listen to?
Not a friend of the artist either however I think this is a really good move by Apple considering they just dropped the iPod lineup. I think a studio recording is one thing to be enjoyable however during this pandemic there’s been a lot of closed raves where people have just hosted from their house and here in different versions of music just like how are used to a different cuts of albums or singles are releases is always more enjoyable because it gives you different emotional feel or maybe a different connection to the song that may be a favour for you or maybe a better version of song that you didn’t like before from sex ed artist.
 
It sounds like you are saying you like to listen to recordings of live performances because it introduces variations. The terms vibe and felt don't really have meaning for me. Are you saying you see it as a cover of the original song by the original artist?
FWIW, there are fans of bands like the Grateful Dead, and Phish, who collect literally hundreds of recordings of different concerts, and bounce back and forth listening to the different performances - many of the same songs, but played a little differently one night than the next.

The Grateful Dead were famous for normally not having a setlist, and playing different songs from their repertoire every night (obviously, some songs would be more frequently repeated as time went by) - often they'd play 2-3 shows over consecutive nights at a given venue and play different songs every night, and many people would attend the entire run of shows, rather than just one (so, a mini-series of concerts?). And, often, they wouldn't play one song, and stop, and then play the next - instead, they'd start with one song and end up 45 minutes later having played 5 different songs without ever stopping - blending/jamming their way from one song to the next. Anyway, some fans would like one run of shows more than some other, but with no universal consensus as to which was the One True Concert performance. Often they were playing songs that didn't sound nearly as good on the old studio recordings, and other times they were playing songs that might not appear on studio recordings until years later, if ever.

As well, some of the songs would evolve over their history of being played live, adding some parts, changing others, modifying lyrics, before they ever got recorded in a studio. You could consider this "beta testing" a song, but with software it is usually the case that most will agree the final version after beta testing is the best/canonical version, but when a song varies over time, you'll find people who like the latest version and others who prefer earlier versions. So, it becomes very difficult to say, "well, this one is the original and that one is a cover".

Similar things happen in jazz, where you may have an original artist/group who wrote a song (or sometimes a song will get listed as "traditional" because it goes back so far, with so many changes along the way, that nobody knows where it originated), but then the song gets passed around and modified and tweaked by other musicians and there can be considerable debate over who played it better, and even if you can agree on an artist, then which of their performances of it is best? And sometimes a musician will write a song, perform it with a bunch of other musicians, who will improvise bits and make minor variations that the original artist might then incorporate back into their (current) version.

And don't even get started on classical music - there are no original recordings Bach, or Beethoven, or a huge number of other beloved composers. There are only modern (in the last century) performances of their works to listen to. Many of those can vary wildly in sound. Which one is correct? Bach is not here to say, neither is Beethoven. You can't buy "Beethoven's Symphony No. 6", you can only buy one (or more) of hundreds of different recordings of it (I have several). For some recordings, the key factor in deciding may be the orchestra, the conductor, the soloist(s) (if any), the label, etc. For, say, Brahms' Violin Concerto, I strongly prefer Jascha Heifetz as the violinist, though many have equally valid reasons to prefer Itzhak Perlman or someone else.

What I'm trying to get at is, oftentimes there is no one canonical performance of a given song, so no other performance is necessarily a cover, and... that's a good thing. Music evolves over time. Some of the evolution is good, some not so much. Sometimes artists do interpretations of their own songs, in concert, that are better than the originals, sometimes they're worse, sometimes they're just different. It sound like you're thinking that a group writes, records, and publishes a song, and that's the canonical version and everything that comes after is cover... and that's much too simplistic of a black & white interpretation of how it works.
 
That's certainly a part of it. Presumably you can imagine that being at a live performance "feels" different from listening to music at home? Watching/listening to streams or recordings of live performances "feels" different from either one. Some like it, some don't, and none is inherently better than any other.

What are you interested in, may I ask? Comparisons are flawed in nature for sure, but if you are genuinely curious about this maybe it could provide some sort of bridge.
I like audiobooks. I can listen to a few hours of lectures at a time. I have a hard time with podcasts because it tends to get repetitive. But I don't think that content is synonymous with music. And I really don't listen to music outside of movies and video games. I really liked the newest Assassin's Creed Valhalla music, but when I went to listen to it on Apple music it didn't really hold my attention.

That's why I ask about live vs prerecorded music. I don't have experience with much of either. Logically working through it I feel the artist puts all their attention into the studio recording as the pinnacle of what they wish they could play. No other performance will ever be exactly what the artist wanted, so you are always getting a variation of the 'official' recording.

I appreciate TV shows with laugh tracks, so that's how I saw live shows. The rest of the audience is providing you with clues about the music that you might have missed listening to at home. Or maybe it helps one feel like their appreciation is shared with other people validating one's own opinion.

I know I am in the minority here, and given how many people love music I feel like I am missing out on something. I just don't have any context for what it is.

FWIW, there are fans of bands like the Grateful Dead, and Phish, who collect literally hundreds of recordings of different concerts, and bounce back and forth listening to the different performances - many of the same songs, but played a little differently one night than the next.

The Grateful Dead were famous for normally not having a setlist, and playing different songs from their repertoire every night (obviously, some songs would be more frequently repeated as time went by) - often they'd play 2-3 shows over consecutive nights at a given venue and play different songs every night, and many people would attend the entire run of shows, rather than just one (so, a mini-series of concerts?). And, often, they wouldn't play one song, and stop, and then play the next - instead, they'd start with one song and end up 45 minutes later having played 5 different songs without ever stopping - blending/jamming their way from one song to the next. Anyway, some fans would like one run of shows more than some other, but with no universal consensus as to which was the One True Concert performance. Often they were playing songs that didn't sound nearly as good on the old studio recordings, and other times they were playing songs that might not appear on studio recordings until years later, if ever.
To me, that reads that it took them years to figure out what it should sound like. Their fans acted as early adopters to get a sneak peek at the processes. I guess I can see where the value is in that. Only then do they say here it is as a final product.
As well, some of the songs would evolve over their history of being played live, adding some parts, changing others, modifying lyrics, before they ever got recorded in a studio. You could consider this "beta testing" a song, but with software it is usually the case that most will agree the final version after beta testing is the best/canonical version, but when a song varies over time, you'll find people who like the latest version and others who prefer earlier versions. So, it becomes very difficult to say, "well, this one is the original and that one is a cover".

Similar things happen in jazz, where you may have an original artist/group who wrote a song (or sometimes a song will get listed as "traditional" because it goes back so far, with so many changes along the way, that nobody knows where it originated), but then the song gets passed around and modified and tweaked by other musicians and there can be considerable debate over who played it better, and even if you can agree on an artist, then which of their performances of it is best? And sometimes a musician will write a song, perform it with a bunch of other musicians, who will improvise bits and make minor variations that the original artist might then incorporate back into their (current) version.

And don't even get started on classical music - there are no original recordings Bach, or Beethoven, or a huge number of other beloved composers. There are only modern (in the last century) performances of their works to listen to. Many of those can vary wildly in sound. Which one is correct? Bach is not here to say, neither is Beethoven. You can't buy "Beethoven's Symphony No. 6", you can only buy one (or more) of hundreds of different recordings of it (I have several). For some recordings, the key factor in deciding may be the orchestra, the conductor, the soloist(s) (if any), the label, etc. For, say, Brahms' Violin Concerto, I strongly prefer Jascha Heifetz as the violinist, though many have equally valid reasons to prefer Itzhak Perlman or someone else.

What I'm trying to get at is, oftentimes there is no one canonical performance of a given song, so no other performance is necessarily a cover, and... that's a good thing. Music evolves over time. Some of the evolution is good, some not so much. Sometimes artists do interpretations of their own songs, in concert, that are better than the originals, sometimes they're worse, sometimes they're just different. It sound like you're thinking that a group writes, records, and publishes a song, and that's the canonical version and everything that comes after is cover... and that's much too simplistic of a black & white interpretation of how it works.
For songs where the original was never recorded that makes sense, but I still don't see how live performances are better than a recording. After all, even if there were different interpretations of the same song, by releasing a studio recording the artists is declaring this is the rendition they perceive to be their ideal interpretation. If you go see them live wouldn't you be judging them based on how close they got to the recording rather than how good it is independently? After all, if you wanted to hear a different take on No 6, you could just go hear someone else perform it.
 
I like audiobooks. I can listen to a few hours of lectures at a time. I have a hard time with podcasts because it tends to get repetitive. But I don't think that content is synonymous with music. And I really don't listen to music outside of movies and video games. I really liked the newest Assassin's Creed Valhalla music, but when I went to listen to it on Apple music it didn't really hold my attention.

That's why I ask about live vs prerecorded music. I don't have experience with much of either. Logically working through it I feel the artist puts all their attention into the studio recording as the pinnacle of what they wish they could play. No other performance will ever be exactly what the artist wanted, so you are always getting a variation of the 'official' recording.

I appreciate TV shows with laugh tracks, so that's how I saw live shows. The rest of the audience is providing you with clues about the music that you might have missed listening to at home. Or maybe it helps one feel like their appreciation is shared with other people validating one's own opinion.

I know I am in the minority here, and given how many people love music I feel like I am missing out on something. I just don't have any context for what it is.


To me, that reads that it took them years to figure out what it should sound like. Their fans acted as early adopters to get a sneak peek at the processes. I guess I can see where the value is in that. Only then do they say here it is as a final product.

For songs where the original was never recorded that makes sense, but I still don't see how live performances are better than a recording. After all, even if there were different interpretations of the same song, by releasing a studio recording the artists is declaring this is the rendition they perceive to be their ideal interpretation. If you go see them live wouldn't you be judging them based on how close they got to the recording rather than how good it is independently? After all, if you wanted to hear a different take on No 6, you could just go hear someone else perform it.
I think you might be overthinking it. Some people may think of their music this way, and that the studio recording is the God's Truth of what that piece of art should be. Maybe some artists prefer/prioritize their live show, but also want to give their fans something to listen to at home/have the studio albums as another revenue stream (or, maybe the record label insists). Maybe some artists view studio recordings and live performance as separate art forms and value both for different reasons. Sometimes that might mean approximately studio recordings in a live setting, other times it might mean adapting their songs into something that feels more appropriate to them for live performance.

People love books. Books are often adapted into plays and films (sometimes involving the original author, sometimes not). Naturally, they require alterations to better fit the medium. Some people love all versions of the story, obviously to appreciate different aspects of each, since they are clearly not exactly the same. Purists might say "the book is what was intended and nothing else was good," and they're allowed to feel that way. Others feel differently.
 
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For songs where the original was never recorded that makes sense, but I still don't see how live performances are better than a recording. After all, even if there were different interpretations of the same song, by releasing a studio recording the artists is declaring this is the rendition they perceive to be their ideal interpretation.
It's frequently not quite that simple (as the part I've bolded). What a song means to an artist can change over time, how they prefer to play it can change. Ever have an intense exchange with someone, that heavily influenced your feelings for (or against) them, and then revisited the situation years or even decades later, and realized that, even though the facts of what happened that day are the same, you feel differently about it now, because of those years, or decades, of intervening life experience? Same thing can happen to musicians. Lots of songs that musicians write are about how they feel about something, or someone, right now.

What came out on that first recording can represent what they felt at the time, which may have changed since then, because they may have changed. In the intervening years they may have grown as a musician (both in their musical skill and in their understanding of and exposure to music). If a lot of time has passed, they may have technology available to them now to do things that they wanted to do in the studio when they first recorded the song, but couldn't make work. As well, if they were early in their career, they may have given in to pressure from the label or the person mixing the album to do things a certain way that isn't really what they wanted to do. An album being released absolutely does not guarantee that that recording represents exactly what they wanted to release, and they may feel very differently about it, years down the road.

If you go see them live wouldn't you be judging them based on how close they got to the recording rather than how good it is independently?
Very much no. Yes, there are occasionally some groups you go to hear where what you want to hear is, essentially, their studio album, but much louder, and it's a bit jarring if they play a single note differently. But there are a lot of other groups where you go because you want to see what they will do with the songs this time (well, and for the intense feelings that live music provides).

If the only thing that people wanted from a concert was to hear the album, but a lot louder, then concerts would be less popular and some sort of sponsored listening parties would be more popular - have your concert hall with the big speakers and maybe the light show, but just play the recording, rather than having the band there (or maybe have them dancing around on stage - to be fair, there have been rare incidents of performers that lip-sync their way through "concerts" - this usually goes over very badly if it gets found out).

Live music gets... hmm, it gets a bonus on the emotional experience scale, simply for being live - being in the audience at a concert for some decently-good band you've never heard of, can be a more intense emotional experience than sitting at home listening to a recording of your favorite band... because it's live - because you're surrounded by a crowd of excited people, the music is loud (often so loud you can feel it as well as hear it), the band is reacting to the audience which is reacting to the band, and it's happening in real time - it can be a really wonderful experience. It's even better, of course, if it's a band you like and they're having a good night. If you go to a concert of a band that you love, and they play a song a little bit different than it was on the album, frequently your response (or mine, at least) is not "hey, they got that note wrong", but rather "ooh, cool, I wonder what will happen next".

And that bonus for live music can carry over into recordings of live music. That doesn't mean it always does, but it can. Frankly, I think a lot of it is down to two things: (1) how well the performer does when live on stage (some artists are better in the studio some better on stage), and (2) how well recorded the concert is - I've heard some pretty awful sounding live recordings, but also some really amazing ones.
 
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I am not the target market here, but can I ask you music fans a question?

If you aren't seeing an artist in person, wouldn't a studio recording be more enjoyable to listen to?
Reason why I never liked live albums; not even glorious ones like the Live After Death of 1985.
Live music never sounds as good as studio.
That said live shows are amazing to watch, like famous Live Aid or the Monsters Of Rock 1991.
The only 2 live albums I enjoy listening to are Pink Floyd at Pompeii 1972 and Metallica Live **** Seattle 1989.
 
Not anymore, with all the electronics, tone control and compensation, anyone can be made to send good.
I guess they turned the machines off. Sometimes they silenced his mic and you could hear the recording and then his live voice again.
 
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